N'Gai Croal
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Jun 19, 2007 01:30 PM
Kathy Vrabeck, president of EA Casual
It was just this February when Electronic Arts announced that its former president, John Riccitiello, would be returning to the company as CEO after a two-and-a-half year absence. Yesterday, Riccitiello officially put his stamp on EA with the unveiling of the company's reorganization into four divisions, topped by the four following label presidents:
- EA Games: to be headed by current executive vice president and general manager of North American publishing Frank Gibeau. This includes such franchises as Spore, Battlefield, Burnout and Medal of Honor.
- EA Sports: to be supervised by executive vice president of legal and business affairs Joel Linzner until a permanent candidate can be found. This includes such licensed sports titles as Madden NFL, NBA Live and NHL.
- EA Sims: to be directed by the current chief of EA's Sims studio, Nancy Smith. This includes The Sims, SimCity and MySims, among other properties.
- EA Casual: to be captained by Kathy Vrabeck, former president of publishing for Activision. This includes EA Mobile and Pogo.
We spoke with Vrabeck shortly after her appointment was announced, but before yesterday's reorganization was unveiled. Here's what she had to say about her fledgling EA Casual division.
First of all, congratulations on your new job.
Thank you. I'm excited about it.
How did conversations with you and EA begin about a) your coming onboard with EA, and then b) you heading up EA Casual?
As you know, I left Activision over a year ago. About a year ago, in June, I started doing a little bit of consulting for EA in their mobile group. So, you know, from that time I started getting to know the EA folks a little better and just getting to know their businesses, but we really didn't have any firm discussions about me joining the company until John Riccitiello came back. I had gotten to know John over the last year or two in his role at Elevation Partners. Although we both had similar backgrounds, we had not met during our videogame days. I spent a lot of time talking with him at Elevation about how you think about videogame companies. And when he came back in and he started meeting with folks at EA and thinking about how he would attack some of the growth parts of the business he called me, we had lunch, and we started talking about his thoughts on EA and whether there was a role for me to play.
I sort of jumped at the casual opportunity for a couple of reasons. One, I think the world of John. I think that he's going to come back into EA and really propel it forward. I think he's going to be doing a lot that will make the whole industry think about how they run their businesses. So I'm excited to work with John. I did spend a fair amount of time looking at what I might want to do next after I left Activision, and had pretty much decided that I would likely not work in games because I wanted to do something that was a little bit different than what I had done. I actually looked at many opportunities outside of gaming and what attracted me to this is that it's enough rooted in what I know, but it's really the next big thing in gaming. It's where I personally think the growth is going to be. It's really fun. It's the kind of games that I relate to a little bit more. So for all those reasons, I was excited about taking the job.
How are you defining casual games? What's going to be coming under your bailiwick?
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